Rather than clutter up the colossal quid thread with off-topic posts, we can clutter up this thread with on-topic posts. Let’s limit this to underwater animals so we at least have something to compare them to each other (environment).
My vote for coolest underwater animal is the Mimic Octopus. It’s a species of octopus that only been recently discovered in Indonesian waters. It’s coolness factor stems from it’s ability to imitate other animals, unlike the normal octopus defense of blending into the background. The mimic octopus can imitate a sea snake, lionfish, flatfish (sole fish), jawfish, jellyfish, and possibly more. The imitation is done to scare away predators, rather than hide from them. A damselfish is swimming nearby? No problem. The mimic turns into a sea snake and scares the fish away.
Darnit Frank #2!! That’s exactly what I thought about when I saw this thread!!! GRRRRR!!!
Since you STOLE MY IDEA, I guess I’ll just have to say that I’m fascinated with stingrays. We went to Stingray City on our honeymoon cruise, and they were just so frickin’ neat!!!
Actually, I am rather fond of all octopuses (octopi?). They are all neat! And from what I’ve read, they could be one of the smarter animals that we know of. A friend of a friend worked at a lab in California where they studied underwatter critters. Unfortunately one of the tanks with crabs kept showing up with empty shells in the morning and they didn’t know why. So they left a video camera on all night and found the culprit- an octopus managed to lift the lid on its tank, climb out, crawl across the floor, up the table leg, into the other tank, eat a crab, then crawl back. Pretty cool, eh?
I wonder if you can keep them in home aquariums easily?
You can keep a small variety of octopi in a tank but you need eliminate all openings in the top and place a weight on the lid. They can squeeze through very small openings or even push open tank lids, as your friend has witnessed.
They aren’t very compatible with other fish as they may be mistaken for food. Octopi also mainly diet on crustaceans, which can be very expensive food.
My ex-boyfriend wanted to be a marine biologist, and he said that a lot of octopi were as smart as cats, at least, and that sometimes if researchers didn’t put heavy enough weights on top of the tanks, the octopi would crawl around at night unplugging things, and generally causing havoc.
I thought that was cool.
I personally love manta rays, and I think giant crabs are neat.
Let’s not forget the Nautilus. And I’ve always thought crinoids were kinda cool – armored flowers.
Alligator gars are pretty cool-looking, too. I once saw one attack a string of fish that my brother, my father and I had caught. There were about half a dozen speckled trout on the line, and the damn thing bit them all in half in one bite.
Portuguese Man 'o War is a pretty fascinating sea creature. From what I understand, it is actually a colony of tiny creatures working together.
Its pretty funny to observe some species of sea snail which unlike their sluggish terrestrial cousins, are viscious predators which will gobble up anything they can catch, and have some of the most potent venoms in the animal kingdom.
Echidnoderms in general are really cool because they are some of the most outlandish and bizarre looking animals; creatures with no head or tail, with radial symmetry. Apparently Sea Urchins are useful for cleaning saltwater fish tanks, as they are ‘janitors’ which munch on algae.
Oh, a link? Hmm. Well, the best video I can find of a cuttlefish displaying its color-changing ability is this one, which doesn’t really do it justice.